Dr. Kate Truitt
speaker
65 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Dr. Kate Truitt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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An applied neuroscientist straddles the line between what's going on in the labs, what I call the ivory tower of the educational space, and the clinical realm. I view myself as a translator of the brain to best help people connect with what's happening in their mind-body system. I specifically focus on the brain areas tied into both trauma and empowerment.
The through line, though, and what really, really lights me up is helping people disseminate the impact of trauma and better understand the weird, painful experiences that happen in our mind-body system when we've been deeply harmed.
I'm also a survivor. I am a survivor of traumatic grief. I was widowed a week before my wedding. And I'm harnessing my own vulnerability and knowledge of neuroscience to shine the light on how change and healing is possible.
When I look at trauma through the lens of neurobiology, I like to distill it down to the concept of threat, safety, or lack of safety. Because we can experience something that feels threatening, such as getting on a roller coaster and plummeting at the earth at a very, very high rate of speed. but also knowing that supposedly if the engineers did their job, we're okay, so therefore we're safe.
If that's the case and we like roller coasters, then it's not traumatic. On the other hand, somebody who gets into the same roller coaster, maybe totally safe, hates roller coasters, but is forced to get on that roller coaster and ride the roller coaster, that could be very traumatic because there's no choice. So threat in of itself is a critical through line of what makes something traumatic.
It could be threat to life or perceived threat to belonging, lovability, threat to one's ability to make choice in their life, to have agency, or threat to the baseline safety.
Our little friend Amy the amygdala, who, that's what I do call her, Amy the amygdala. The amygdala is a part of our brain whose primary job is to keep us alive. And when we feel threatened, she's assessing in our brain these core values of, am I safe? Am I lovable or do I belong? And can I create change or what I call be successful in my life?
And if there's a direct threat to any of those values, then there's the possibility of something being encoded in our brain as traumatic.
Now, there's this concept in society on social media in the clinical realm of big T versus small T trauma. Big T trauma being something that we just lived through here in Los Angeles, these fires, or any natural disaster, or a direct assault, or something that is very clear that if you told another human this happened, societally that other person would say, yeah, that's definitely traumatic.
Small T trauma are often just as impactful, but they're missed in the trauma dialogue, and they create ongoing traumatic stress as well in the system. But there are things that directly threaten those core values in more subtle ways, such as coercive control. feeling assaulted or humiliated or intimidated all of the time in ways that don't leave an actual mark perhaps on the body.
Those small T traumas can be just as impactful on how the mind-body system is experiencing and processing data. Whether it be a big T or a small T trauma, when those experiences happen, it fundamentally changes the way our brain and our body are making sense of the world around us.
One of my favorite examples of this is if we go back to February of 2020. If somebody sneezed, then it may have been a simple, Gesundheit, bless you. Not an entire fearful mind-body reaction to, oh my gosh, is that person sick with a virus that could kill us? Fast forward to August 2020, a sneeze for many people had a very different connotation.
That's a type of neuroplasticity known as stress-induced structural plasticity. Now, sitting here in 2025, a sneeze for many people, once again, is just a sneeze. That's how our brain is supposed to respond to threats and then also unlearn threats when it's no longer actually threatening to us.
When we're living in a state where there is constant internalization of fear, of trauma, where our brain has learned and started to design itself around traumatic experiences, even if the trauma is no longer happening, the traumatic event might have been, you know, for two years during one's childhood, but if those two years were impactful enough, the brain is still going to be harnessing and utilizing the neural pathways set down during those childhood years.
It's a rewiring of our mind-body system into feeling chronically unsafe. Oftentimes, too, though, it becomes an internalization. It changes how we experience ourselves in the world. We start having negative viewpoints on our capacity, our lovability. We start feeling as though there's something wrong with us. We're shameful or that we're a chronic failure. We can't make change in our world.
Our body may be rewired into a state of chronic stress or vigilance, meaning that all of a sudden our gastrointestinal system simply stops functioning the way it used to, which is a part of a trauma response, or we can't sleep very well or feel rested when we're sleeping.
So the impact of whether it be big T or small T trauma happens in many, many layers across the course of our mind-body functioning.
The really good news about our brain is it's changeable. It's plastic. That's where the buzzy word neuroplasticity comes from.
Because of neuroplasticity, we can help the brain carve new neural pathways and strengthen the ones that we want while either desensitizing the ones that we don't want or even helping the brain shift through and release the ones that are anchored in by trauma and creating space for new learnings going forward, a new way of being in the world.
And we can play a very active role in that when we know how.
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